SocGen Wins Defamation Suit Over Report Questioning Solvency
Societe Generale SA (GLE) won a defamation suit against an online news site over a September report that France’s second biggest bank was shut out of the interbank lending market.
ElectronLibre.info, published by Paris-based EL Publishing SAS, must pay 1 euro ($1.35) to Societe Generale for publishing the report, a Paris court ruled today.
EL Publishing and director Emmanuel Torregano were ordered to pay Societe Generale legal costs and to remove the Sept. 7 article from the site within three days or risk an additional 1,000-euro-a-day fine. The site must also run a paragraph on its homepage saying the court condemned it for running the article and to pay for that to appear in a publication of Societe Generale’s choosing.
Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis has hit French banks hard. Societe Generale has fought to maintain customer confidence as shares have dropped almost 46 percent since Aug. 1 and its third-quarter profit fell 31 percent on a 333 million-euro pretax writedown on Greek sovereign debt and lower trading revenue. The bank sued Associated Newspapers Ltd.’s Mail on Sunday in London last month for an August report that it was in a “perilous” state and possibly on the “brink of disaster.”
“Given the current situation and all that we have learned” about banks during the sovereign-debt crisis, “I will advise my client to appeal,” ElectronLibre lawyer Hasna Boulet said in a telephone interview.
To contact the reporter on this story: Heather Smith in Paris at hsmith26@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net.
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